Farewell Amor
Week 05
The film Farewell Amor begins at the end of a separation. It follows three family members who reunite after 17 years apart. We learn quite early that Walter, the father, had left Angola for the US 17 years ago in order to build a life for his family. It has taken a long time filled with immigration appeals and paperwork before he is eventually joined by his wife, Esther, and his daughter, Sylvia, who has mostly only seen her father through the screen of a phone. Living together in a one-bedroom apartment after so long apart, they’re forced to face each other’s changes, insecurities, and fears. Walter and Esther discover that distance and time have turned them into different people than they were all those years ago. Though they have reunited, each wonders in their own way if there is anything left to salvage, constantly grappling with insecurities and past decisions. The film shifts between each character’s perspective, and through their eyes we see them learning how each of them has let the other down in their own ways.
Though it’s never explicit about it, Farewell Amor is ultimately an immigrant story set in New York. The immigrant experience itself serves as the subtle, fourth character in the film. The scenes from Walter’s perspective feel slow, inquisitive, silent. There is a lot of waiting and adjusting and thinking and holding back. It feels almost as if life slows down — even in a busy city like New York.
There is a particular immigrant experience captured in these frames. Talk to any immigrant in any country and no matter the path they took, there are countless stories of waiting. Long periods of waiting. Waiting for a job, waiting for paperwork, waiting for permanency (which many will say isn’t the same as acceptance), waiting for approvals, waiting for approvals to file more approvals, waiting for naturalisation, and eventually, even after naturalisation and not with any desire, waiting for a potential screw-up that could threaten denaturalisation. After long periods of wanting to be accepted, it sometimes becomes hard to even feel accepted. Yet these are background stories. Most people look ahead, adapt, and keep on carrying on. Bring a bit of their own culture and take a bit of the new. Life goes on.
We learn that Walter had a girlfriend with whom he reluctantly broke up prior to the arrival of his family. Esther has found solace in the church, immersing herself so deeply that her insecurities have taken hold of her mind. Once a keen dancer with Walter, she now forbids Sylvia from dancing. She fears she’s no longer good enough for Walter, dreading the collapse of her dream for a happy family. Sylvia, having had her entire world turned upside down, displays her anxiety in the cramped apartment, yet craves a more vivid life of dance and expression outside it.
Eventually, this web of insecurities unravels. They realise they have built their own versions of the world in the past 17 years that the other has been a part of but that has not, in fact, been a shared world. Each of them has been unkind in their own way, despite operating from a place of care. As things unfold, it momentarily seems they might lose each other irrevocably — yet they find a way to reconnect, choosing to build on their shared love of dance.
Salman Rushdie, in Imaginary Homelands, writes that the word ‘translation’ comes from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we’re ’translated’ men, such that sometimes it appears that we straddle two or more cultures with ease and sometimes we fall between the stools. In moments of displacement — whether physical or emotional — we find ourselves suspended between the worlds we know and the ones we are only beginning to understand. It is in these spaces between the yes and the no that we learn to make sense of who we have become and how we may belong.
🥘 Food
- An uninspiring chicken, rice, and egg bowl:
📚 Reading
- Pleasure of Thinking, Wang Xiaobo